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He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.
Paul-Maud'Dib DUNE

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a blueprint for destroying capitalism.
Did she know she was advocating the destruction of that which she asserted as the highest economic ideal system?
NO!
This is a Zizekian case of the unknown/known

John Galt knew how to destroy the bureaucracy completely;
That is, he had the real control of it.
By THE STRIKE! The EXIT!

A can destroy B so A has the real control of B. A knows that they can destroy B. (known/known) B can destroy A so B has the real control of A. B does not know that they can destroy A. (unknown/known). C can destroy A so C has real control of A. C knows that they can destroy A. (known/known) C can destroy B so C has real control of B. C knows that they can destroy B (known/known).

How can C destroy B? By refusing to destroy A? Does C wish to destroy A? does C wish to destroy B? Or does C wish to liberate B? Gets dicey eh. A can physically destroy C. The poison pill is that if A does so, A is violating legal precedent. A violation of legal precedent is worse than just destroying C without violating legal precedent (the State) so punishment, imprisonment, death will be additional because the state will have been violated which is much worse than violating a person. This is part of the genealogy of crime and what is a crime.

This takes us into Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Crime was first defined as a "crime against the Sovereign." If someone stole your money, it was not a crime against you, but a crime against the King, the Sovereign. You lost your money but the crime was against the Sovereign so the punishment was severe.

Sometimes death for an insignificant crime

BECAUSE

it was a crime against the Sovereign!

A Genealogy of Crime

By the way this is how the Boston Marathon Bombing became a terrorist event. It became labeled as a crime against the state because the Boston Marathon is an annual event held in Boston. Twist that illogical thinking around in your reasoning will ya.

This thinking is an extension of Ratliff and Hartline's experimental work on Limulus.The eye of Limulus is composed of ommatidium each one separate from all the others but affecting others dependent upon how contingent they are to another. So ommatidium A can affect ommatidium B by suppressing the response of B. If within a certain distance measurable in the experiments. But C can suppress A thus lessening the strength of the stimulus from ommatidium A and therefore suppressing A's suppression of B. In which case B's response is enhanced.

This is called disinhibition.

Can we also liken it to disinformation. Or to distraction, thus lessening the strength / import of news, facts, occurrences, and other stimuli the Government wishes to weaken as it circulates among the citizens

And I can extend it to parental behavior that lessens the will of the child for good or bad. Or to the behavior of any one person in a dyad with another person which has been described as dependent or co-dependent behavior. Does one parent disinhibit the stimuli of the other parent thus increasing the responses of the child that exhibit the will of the child and the actualization of the child, or partner, or or or or........

Reading Rob Pattinson, Baudrillard and Rand Through Nietzsche

Rob's Early Career

Rob Pattinson's deleted lovely face in Vanity Fair has taken on some legs since first I imagined it into existence. IF that scene with his beautiful 17 year old face had remained in that film, turning everyone else in it into oval oblivion, then clearly his film career would have begun in that moment, and he might never have been Cedric or Art or the cutesy in Bad Mother's Handbook. Can't you just see the stream of studley teen movies they would have put him in, and Rob, who inherently likes to please and be loved, probably would have succumbed for awhile as did Brad Pitt. Yeah I think he would have awakened form his Sleeping Beauty role after awhile. But surely no Edward Cullen would have been considered, nor the Scummit machine tolerated.

This is what Baudrillard calls Nietzsche's revenge when the same happens to him. Baudrillard's reading of Nietzsche is "worse", excessive, too much for the examiners.


This is following Nietzsche through Baudrillard. Rob's beauty in Vanity Fair was more beautiful than beautiful; hyper beautiful; obscenely beautiful as all the others in the scene looked dead; hence, implosion. It was "worse" as Nietzsche might have said. Too  much to be there, to exist there. Crash and burn.

Baudrillard takes his examinations and both the oral and the written are on Nietzsche. Since he has immersed himself in Nietzsche in German, this is a big piece of luck for him. His reading is not agreed with by the examiners and they fail him. He calls this Nietzsche's revenge. At that point in time he stops reading Nietzsche, never to go back to him again until the end of his life. Nietzsche goes underground in Baudrillard's mind, heart and psyche, never to leave, always to be a deep part of him. Forever. This, he acknowledges: (Fragments)

Nietzsche is in me in the mode of the unzeitgemass as he puts it himself, the mode  of the untimely. 

Beautiful I think

Genealogy of Morals

Ayn Rand reads Nietzsche  at University when very young in Russia. Nietzsche is not part of the curriculum so she reads him on the sly, following her heart, already aware of Soviet propaganda and surveillance. This early Rand is even then crossing the boundaries of mainstream. At 21 she comes to the US and she is still reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the first book she buys in English. As a young woman in Hollywood she is still reading Nietzsche. Seriously.  Rand did everything seriously. And all the way up until the 1940's (She was born in 1905) until  she is finished writing The Fountainhead. Each chapter was to be headed by a Nietzsche quote. Fountainhead was published in 1943, on wartime paper, even though it was a very long novel. Egad! No Nietzsche no no no must Bobbs-Merrill have said - so no Nietzsche chapter heads. At that point in her journals she disavows Nietzsche as just an early interest - infatuation?  Her journals have been scrubbed and scrubbed again to get Nietzsche outta Dodge. (Goddess of the Marketplace)Some Nietzsche quotes and thoughts about him  had to stay because everyone knew Howard Roark and especially John Galt were Nietzschean Supermen, so the obvious references and interpretations remained. (These are "floating signs" masking the deep references to Nietzsche.)But the deep underground of Rand's mind, heart and soul belonged to Nietzsche. This is what makes her a post modern philosopher who wrote fiction. Just as a Cronenberg makes films.

Rand Early Hollywood

Both Baudrillard and Rand disavowing Nietzsche during the 1940's? While Hitler is praising him to the skies as Leni Riefenstahl shoots him, Hitler that is, against the blue sky in her film Triumph of the Will; the Superman, the Overman of Nietzsche. Even the great and powerful Foucault, after the war, did not admit the great influence and debt he owed Nietzsche for his genealogy. Only towards the end of his life did he say that he wished he had acknowledged Nietzsche earlier on. And we all know the neverending hits and slurs that Heidegger took, and still takes, for his early pro Nazi sympathies. Not to mention the loss of his lover Hannah Arendt.

Baudrillard and Rand were wise to shut up and Foucault also.

Only now is Nietzsche taking his rightful place in the sun. 

Baudrillard acknowledges Nietzsche's permanent and ongoing influence, but more in the vein of flowing through his blood and guts than in any quotes, said or written. Would it have been any different for Rand who doesn't think in terms of unconscious rivers running deep in her psyche? Denial first, second and third for Rand. But Nietzsche is still there for the discerning reader of Rand, Nietzsche and Baudrillard.

But how to tease it out of Rand. Maybe Nathaniel could tell us. Or myself who, once upon a time, long long ago in a kingdom by the sea, was an Objectivist from 1960-1964. A serious one.